University of New Orleans Theses and
Dissertations Dissertations and Theses
Summer 8-8-2007
Les Bon Temps
Les Bon Temps
Todd Schrenk
University of New Orleans
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A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Fine Arts in
Film, Theater and Communication Arts Nonfiction Writing
by
Todd Schrenk
B.F.A. DePaul University, Chicago, 1993
Dedicated to Patricia Nugent,
Part 1 ...3
The Black Italian...3
The Purpose of The Poet...20
“Indian Red” ...29
Part 2 ...42
Tap ...42
Let It Suck...57
Eight-Percenting Us to Death ...68
Part 3 ...80
A Million Mardi Gras Now...80
Cool It or Blow ...94
and 2007. Though not specifically about the effects of hurricane Katrina on the city, this collection provides a personal glimpse of post-Katrina New Orleans though the eyes of the author. The essays address subjects such as race relations, public protest, tap water quality, post-traumatic depression, energy monopolies, lifestyle, culture, and evacuation.
Preface
When I first began to think about what has become Les Bon Temps, in the spring and
summer of 2005, I envisioned a collection of essays that would look at New Orleans from
unusual angles. I wanted to capture aspects of the city that I had not yet seen articulated, to
present a kind of collage not just of “my New Orleans” but that of my family and friends, a
limited but decidedly insider perspective. I was born here, as were my parents, grandparents and
great grandparents on both sides of my family. My wife Trish, who is from Quincy,
Massachusetts, has traced the ancestry of my paternal grandmother’s family in New Orleans at
least back to the 1740s, during the French-colonial period. That would make my two brothers
and me eleventh-generation natives. I say this not because I wanted to write about my family’s
history but to suggest one reason for my interest in writing about the city and, perhaps, to lend
some genealogical weight to the perspective I offer.
In a sense I have written the collection I planned to write but with one unexpected, and
nearly all consuming, influence, which became at least the thematic subtext--if not the raison
d’etre--for each of these essays: hurricane Katrina. Each of these pieces was written after the
catastrophe that began on August 29, 2005. To this day and for many years to come, the citizens
of New Orleans and the residents of the surrounding region will live with the ongoing
repercussions of that event. In some ways New Orleans has changed forever, and one of our
struggles is to reconcile the old with the new in a way that respects both. Of course this is a
common challenge people face when the things they love inevitably change. Except in the case
of death, though, these changes tend to evolve over time, and even death can be gradual. The
change we experienced, as a city and as individuals, was acute. Some of what we loved has
survived, some has been lost forever, but much remains on life support. Some of us are able to
remain optimistic about the city’s prognosis, while others have succumbed to pessimism. I would
guess most, though, fluctuate uneasily between the two. We live in a world of uncertainty in
ways that those living elsewhere in this country do not. A writer living though this historic
essays about post-Katrina New Orleans would be misleading. I prefer to think of it as a
collection of essays about New Orleans written from a post-Katrina perspective.
Some of these essays, such as “Let It Suck,” or “Cool It or Blow,” address what one
might consider Katrina-related subjects: post-traumatic depression, the decision to or not to
evacuate. “The Black Italian,” and “The Purpose of The Poet,” both address the subject of racial
tension, which existed well before Katrina, but they do so from within the context of the world
Katrina helped to create: one from the perspective of a bike ride through flood-ravaged Central
City, the other through a poet’s dissent against added security at a music club. “Tap” and
“Indian Red” also address preexisting subjects--the quality of tap water in New Orleans and
concerns about the efficacy of contemporary public protest--but again these essays do so from a
post-Katrina environment and perspective. “Eight-Percenting Us to Death,” analyzes and
challenges the actions and policies of Entergy New Orleans following the storm, but the
questions it raises may be applicable to any private energy corporation with a virtual monopoly
on local service provision. “A Million Mardi Gras Now,” depicts one aspect of the city’s culture
that promises to survive--though not unchanged. This essay looks at Mardi Gras both before and
after the storm in an attempt to capture something of the true spirit of the celebration.
As Lafcadio Hearn wrote of New Orleans in the 1870s in a letter to a friend, “Times are
not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes . . . . Its condition is so bad that when I write
about it . . . nobody will believe that I am telling the truth. But it’s better to live here in sackcloth
and ashes, than to own the whole state of Ohio.” Hearn’s sentiment is current and common
among those determined to live in New Orleans today. For all its faults--and we do recognize
them--even in its darkest days, the city has a allure, a beauty that for some remains irresistible
Part One
The Black Italian
In November 2005, on a bicycle I’d borrowed from my brother, I rolled through the quiet,
dusty streets of Central City, New Orleans. The sun warmed the air from high in the cloudless
sky, and a dry, steady breeze suffused the afternoon with a comfortable autumn coolness.
Sudden gusts caused screen doors to slap open, cracking like gun shots against the clapboard
walls of shotgun doubles. Strips of vinyl siding that had been torn loose in the storm dangled and
flapped against the side of an abandoned corner store as I pedaled past. Birds sang in the trees
and swooped from rooftops, and cats crept through rubble that had been scattered to the curb.
An oily, black stripe across the fronts of houses, residue from the high water mark that left a
filthy ring around everything, marked my fluctuating elevation as I cruised through the now dry
neighborhood.
Central City lies just beyond the Garden District heading away from the Mississippi
River. St. Charles Avenue establishes the boundary between the two neighborhoods, both of
which were built between the 1830s and the 1840s. The Garden District was conceived as an
upscale neighborhood of impressive mansions designed by talented architects and built by
wealthy New Orleans society families; Central City was designed by real estate developers on
the site of a mosquito-infested swamp, and consisted of inexpensive rental properties for working
class immigrants.
Central City quickly evolved into an ethnically and racially mixed neighborhood where
African American residents lived among German, Irish, Jewish and Italian populations. Central
City was home to Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Kid Ory, Papa Celestin, Pops Foster, and other
influential jazz musicians. The famous Dew Drop Inn, where local and touring musicians
gathered for late-night jam sessions that continued past sunrise, was located in Central City. The
New Orleans where African-American residents could patronize stores free of harassment by
white clerks and customers.
After the 1960s, however, Central City began to change. With the advent of integration
following the Civil Rights Movement, other commercial districts became more accessible to
African-American residents, and businesses in Central City, including many black-owned
businesses, suffered. Many white middle and upper-middle class residents uncomfortable with
integration began to flee to the suburbs, debilitating the city’s tax base. Making matters worse,
the national recession of the 1970s accelerated the decline of many of the predominantly black,
working class neighborhoods.
Today, while the Garden District is famous around the world for its elegant and
well-preserved antebellum mansions and lush tropical flora, Central City is known, mostly locally, for
poverty, blight and crime. According to the 2000 Census, Central City was home to 19,072
residents. Eighty-seven percent of these residents were black. But in November of 2005,
Central City was pretty much empty.
As I weaved through the streets with no particular destination in mind, I encountered
scattered residents, nearly all men, among the mostly vacant blocks who returned to the
neighborhood during the days to work on their houses. They shuffled through debris, gutted
flood-damaged apartments, repaired roofs, sat on stoops, or stood talking in small groups. I
waved as I passed. “How ya doing?” I asked.
They waved back. “All right,” they said, a standard greeting, though clearly, things were
not all right.
I saw an old woman sitting in a chair on the second-floor porch of a dingy, stucco house.
She was eating something out of a can with a spoon. I waved.
“How ya doing?” she asked.
“I’m doing all right,” I said. “And you?”
“Good,” I said, but my response felt inadequate. I wanted to say more, but didn’t know
what to say. I wondered whether she was living in that house, whether she had electricity,
whether she had heated up that can of food or was eating it cold.
I felt conspicuous riding through Central City. I projected suspicion into the friendly
nods from the people. “Who’s this white boy?” I imagined them thinking as they watched me
pass. I felt guilty, as though I were intruding, as though I were taking advantage of people’s
absence to sneak a peek at something private. I tried to compensate for this sense of guilt by
self-consciously projecting a tone of sympathy and respect through my greetings. I didn’t want
to be mistaken for an opportunist. I worried, absurdly, that someone might think that I was out
prospecting for cheap real estate--on a bicycle. I wanted to explain myself, to tell people, “I used
to be afraid to come here.” To let them know that I wanted to connect, but I didn’t know
whether that would be possible or what that would mean.
*
I was born in New Orleans, grew up here, went to high school here, and then left to
attend college in Chicago. After college I lived in New York City for eight years, during which
time I met my wife, Trish. We moved to Austin, Texas, lived there for two years, and then in the
summer of 2003, moved back to New Orleans. I was thirty-two years old.
Having lived the first eighteen years of my life in the city, I never spent much time
studying maps of New Orleans. I knew my way around, had my routes. I was content with my
habitual haunts. When I returned for brief visits during the fourteen years I lived away, I
expanded my range a little but pretty much kept to the same familiar paths. Over time, my
regular routes became more deeply ingrained, solidifying a mental map of New Orleans that I
had been unconsciously composing since childhood. When I returned to live here as an adult, I
began to expand my childhood map, but there remained large sections of New Orleans, what one
might call the inner city, into which I did not venture. I had no reason to go there. I didn’t have
to go through these neighborhoods to get where I wanted to go; I could easily bypass them, and I
of how the city fit together. When I returned to New Orleans, the population was close to
seventy-percent black, and a huge part of this black population lived in these “voids.”
The old neighborhoods of New Orleans wrap around two bends in the Mississippi River.
Although the river runs through the United States from north to south, the curves that snake past
New Orleans flow, more or less, west to east, like a crude S that has fallen forward. This twisted
geography has created a kind of paradox in which, if you wanted to cross the river from the
business district to the city’s West Bank, to the west side of the Mississippi, you would drive due
east across a bridge. Make sense? Because many of the streets that run parallel to the river
change trajectories to follow its curves, and because many of the streets that run perpendicular to
the river either converge or expand like spokes on a wheel (and some of the spokes are badly
bent), the terms north, south, east, or west are useless for street directions in New Orleans. Two
streets that appear to run parallel in one neighborhood because they both cross the same street at
ninety-degree angles, intersect in another part of the city. Many of the neighborhoods that
extend north from the French Quarter toward Lake Ponchartrain were actually planned and built
as grids of square blocks, but many of these grids, because of the curves in the river, connect
with adjacent grids at odd angles, so streets gradually change direction as you continue along
them.
Though I felt as though I knew my way around New Orleans, my mental map of the city
didn’t always adjust for all these curves and odd angles. I had no real sense of direction.
Though I knew how to get from one street to another, I had no real sense of how certain streets
curved or how the shifting diagonals changed my spatial relationship to different parts of the
city. I’d seen maps of New Orleans but never studied them closely enough to reconcile the
layout on an actual map with my more intuitively conceived, and deeply ingrained, mental map.
And because my mental map suffered from what I perceived as void spaces where poor black
people tended to lived, my sense of the city never really coalesced into a tangible whole. I knew
those parts, and I skipped over others. As I traversed the city, driving from one part to another,
skirting the edges of unfamiliar neighborhoods, I often found myself looking down the streets
that led into my voids, wondering what it looked like back there, what life was like in the void.
As a child I harbored a similar curiosity about the Lafitte housing projects. I remember
passing these projects on Orleans Avenue in a car with my mother. We would sometimes take
this route to get from Mid City to the French Quarter. And as we passed, my mother would warn
me to make sure my door was locked. The projects were dangerous, she explained, and you
never knew when someone might approach the car, open the door, and grab a purse. Or worse,
put a gun to your head and take the whole car. These things sometimes happened.
I watched out the window with fascination as we passed the three and four-story, brick
buildings that lined Orleans Avenue. I saw people everywhere: children, parents, grandparents.
The projects didn’t look particularly dangerous, but I believed my mother when she told me they
were. I looked back into the grassy courtyards between the buildings, at the paved walkways
that that led deeper into the unknown, past the buildings behind those on Orleans, and farther,
past buildings behind those. Oak trees shaded the courtyards, and the paths disappeared into
what I imagined as a brown-brick labyrinth. Because I only ever passed the projects on one
side, I had no concept of how far back they extended. For all I knew, they might go on forever.
Such is the nature of a void. It often has no discernible boundaries, no limits. I tried to imagine
what it might be like to walk back along those paths, to venture into the depths of the projects.
What would happen to me? What was back there?
Even at age thirty-four, when passing the Lafitte houses, I would watch from my car. I
saw children playing, families grilling burgers, boys and girls holding hands, men and women
sitting on porches, drinking beer, laughing, talking. It still didn’t look dangerous. Of course,
newspaper accounts of crime, shootings, murders, contradicted the happy scene beyond my
window and reinforced a sense of invisible danger. I knew these things happened, but all I saw
as I passed were people living their lives. It depressed me to think that I couldn’t go there, stroll
preventing me from doing so, but the psychological boundary established by race and class and
solidified over generations felt palpable. And these psychological boundaries defined the
geography of my mental map of New Orleans.
The creation of these boundaries, though, resulted from more than just psychological
habit. The divisions between where I felt I could go and where I felt I should not go were also
informed by a healthy dose of common sense. New Orleans has always been a dangerous city.
Some years the crime rates go up and some years they go down, but when compared to national
statistics for any given year, the crime rates here have always been high. For several years over
the course of my lifetime, New Orleans has distinguished itself as the “murder capital of the
country.” And in years when other cities have managed to surpass our penchant for violence,
New Orleans has consistently ranked among the top five.
In 1994 New Orleans captured the most-murderous-city-in-the-U.S. distinction with a
record-breaking 425 murders. This marked a 7.6 percent increase from the previous year, while
the national trend for cities of similar size averaged a decrease of 3 percent. Over the next five
years, the number of murders in New Orleans dropped to a low of 159 in 1999. By 2002,
however, New Orleans had recaptured its title with 257 murders, the highest homicide rate that
year among cities with a population of 250,000 or more. By 2004, the murder rate in New
Orleans was nearly ten times the national average, and by August of 2005, up to the day before
Katrina, the city had recorded 202 murders for the year, well on its way to yet another annual
increase.
In the first weeks of September, following the hurricane, the local, state, and federal
governments managed to empty New Orleans of nearly its entire population, close to
half-a-million citizens. Unofficial speculation estimates that only about one thousand residents who
refused to leave for the storm were able to elude authorities and remain in their homes during the
subsequent mandatory evacuations. It wasn’t until the first week of October, after hurricane Rita
among this first, lucky group. As the city gradually repaired some of its wrecked infrastructure,
more neighborhoods opened. Some homes were habitable, but eighty percent of the city had
flooded, and most homes could only be gutted as residents awaited word from their insurance
companies. By the end of December, the New Orleans Police Department had recorded only two
murders since the chaos following Katrina. With many of the city’s poorer residents still unable
to return home, violent crime had all but vanished.
In mid-November I decided to take the opportunity, while New Orleans was still “safe,”
to fill in some of the voids in my mental map, to venture into the neighborhoods I had previously
been afraid to enter. Central City was one of these neighborhoods. I’d dabbled at its edges,
where the early stages of gentrification had begun to creep in from St. Charles Avenue, but I’d
never really burrowed into the heart of it, never gone straight through and come out the other
side.
*
I kept alert as I zigzagged through Central City. Most of the people working on homes
were older men, and their friendly greetings put me at ease. I passed a younger man, maybe a
teenager--floppy braids and baggy pants. He was walking. I made eye contact. “How you
doing?” I said. He nodded, cool, expressionless, not hostile, but not friendly either. Two guys
cruised past in a car. I looked over my shoulder to make sure they hadn’t turned around to
follow me. They hadn’t. The young guys made me more nervous than the old guys. Two guys
more so than one. But no one bothered me or gave me any reason to feel nervous. The terrain
was familiar even though the neighborhood was not. Central City looked like New Orleans. I
don’t know what else I expected.
I rounded a corner and saw a larger street ahead. A couple of cars whizzed past. Had I
come to the end of Central City? I had lost my sense of direction, become turned around in the
void, and wondered where I would emerge. I reached the end of the block and stopped. I didn’t
recognize the street. Where was I? I looked to my right and spotted a familiar store, Hub Hobby
six, maybe ten times a week I passed this intersection, but because I had rolled up from Central
City, from a strange angle, it looked utterly foreign. I’d made a connection. A new section of
my mental map clicked into place. I turned around and dove back into Central City.
When I hit Martin Luther King Boulevard, I found myself at the edge of a sprawling
housing development. Four-story, tan-brick buildings lined M.L.K. for blocks. Acres of silent
and abandoned projects stretched before me. Each building had a small concrete porch with an
open doorway (none of these buildings had front doors) into a shadowy foyer with mailboxes on
the wall and a set of stairs leading up, into darkness. A plastic grocery bag, puffed with wind,
scraped across the street, an urban tumbleweed. I didn’t recognize these projects. They looked
more modern than the Lafitte or the Magnolia projects. And they looked desolate. When I
reached the intersection of M.L.K. and South Galvez, I saw a metal sign on the median, “B.W.
Cooper Apartments.” So these are the Cooper projects, I thought to myself. I’d heard of them,
but I never really knew where they were.
I’d seen photographs of the Cooper projects in the newspaper. The pictures were often
similar: a body sprawled in the street, people standing around, children sitting on porches with
unimpressed expressions, faces resigned to shootings, to murders. The body language of the
people in the photographs betrayed a horrible familiarity with violence, with the sight of another
young man, a boy they knew, gunned down in front of their homes. I turned onto South Galvez
and entered the Cooper projects.
Oak trees lined the median that split Galvez, a relatively wide street. A couple of blocks
in, the style of the buildings changed. These were smaller, two and three-stories high, with long,
concrete porches and red, painted columns supporting second-floor balconies. The balconies had
black, wrought-iron railings, and some contained shelves full of potted plants. These buildings
had front doors as well as screen doors, and old, wooden window frames, as opposed to the
cheaper-looking aluminum frames on the four-story buildings. I later learned that the buildings
the late 30s and early 40s. The older sections looked less institutional, more like a
neighborhood, more like other New Orleans projects I’d seen.
The wide grassy spaces between the buildings had become overgrown with weeds and
home to overturned shopping carts, discarded mattresses, flooded-out cars, and scattered rubbish.
A beached motorboat lay in the grass beside a small porch at the back of one of the buildings. I
wondered how its journey had ended there.
At the next corner I noticed the street sign: Erato, a street named for the muse of love
poetry. But for me Erato evoked an altogether different mythology. I was riding in a car with
my father. I was young. We must have crossed Erato at St. Charles Avenue.
“Don’t ever go down Erato Street,” my father warned. “The police don’t even go down
there. Once, someone found a severed head in the gutter. Just a head.”
And now here I was: Erato. The word itself made me think of rats. My father’s warning
echoed in my memory. I continued on Galvez until I reached the end of the projects, at the
Earhardt Expressway. Another piece of my mental map fell into place. I’d seen these projects
from Earhardt. A high school friend used to cut down this street on occasion to get from the now
defunct Mermaid Lounge, in the Warehouse District, back to his mother’s house off Carrollton
Avenue. I’d always called these the “Earhardt Projects.” My map was coming together. I
turned back on Galvez, back to Erato Street. It seemed foolish to pass up the opportunity.
Erato was a much narrower street than Galvez, more intimate. I followed Erato deeper
into B.W. Cooper. The buildings surrounded me; they were all I could see in every direction,
infinite projects. I saw a man standing in front of one of the 1930s-style buildings, an older man,
maybe in his sixties, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit and a matching hat with a crisp brim. He
was feeding a few cats from a large sack of kibble. I waved as I passed. “Hello.”
He looked up and waved. “All right.”
It occurred to me that this man and I could be the only two people in the entire Cooper
projects--on Erato Street. I turned around and stopped in front of his building. “Feeding the
“Somebody has to,” he said. His tinted eyeglasses sported squares of gold filigree where
the wide stems met the frames. He looked slick and clean, out of place in the the ravaged
projects.
“They look healthy,” I said of the cats. “Well fed.” They were large, muscular street
cats, maybe four or five of them.
The man said he’d lost ten cats in the storm. Ten cats! How many cats did this guy own?
“Two from over there, one over there.” He began pointing out the different buildings
around which the cats had lived. He said at first people hadn’t liked having all these cats around,
but when they realized that with more cats there were fewer rats, people began to acquire cats
and bring them into the apartments. But once the rats went away, the people threw the cats
outside. “My wife and I spend about a hundred dollars a month on food to feed all these cats.”
He poured piles of kibble onto several metal baking sheets he’d placed on the ground.
Cats came from across the street, from behind the buildings. After he had emptied the bag of
kibble, the man began opening cans of wet food and spooning it out for the cats. He appeared in
no hurry as he walked to the trunk of his car--a shiny, black Camry, or some similar new-model
sedan--to open more food and then back to the various baking sheets to distribute it, talking to
me as he went.
“This one here, this one’s called Adopted,” he said, indicating a large, black cat.
“Because, you know, cats won’t let new cats into their group. They keep them out. But when
the people who owned this cat put her out, the other cats accepted her. And so this one’s called
Adopted. She’s the mother, and this one here’s called Little Adopted. That’s the son. So we
have Adopted and Little Adopted,” he said looking around at the cats. “And that one’s White
Tip because of the white on the tip of his tail.”
I later learned the man’s name was Carl. His face was round and benevolent, but his gaze
savvy, watching from behind his gray tinted lenses.
“Like Jingle Bells. He was the dog in Master P.’s first movie, Bout It, Bout it.” Master P. was a
rapper, record producer, and filmmaker who had grown up in the Cooper Projects where Bout It,
Bout It had been filmed. Carl said Jingles had died at age seven from cancer of the nose. “My
wife took care of that dog. She’d take him to the doctor for anything, even if he just had a
sneeze.”
“Once I caught my son hitting the dog,” Carl said. “I told him he either had to get along
with the dog, or he had to go, out of the house.”
“Man, that’s cold,” his son had said, “siding with a dog over your son.”
Carl explained to his son that the dog took care of his wife, protected her when he went to
work. “You do what you have to do to take care of your woman,” said Carl, “but this dog takes
care of my wife.” His son could stay or go, no matter to Carl, but the dog stayed.
“When Jingles’s condition started to decline,” Carl continued, “my wife took him to
doctors, to specialists, all kinds of people trying to find out what was wrong with him, but no one
could figure it out. Eventually they found the cancer in his nose, but it was too late. When he
died we got piles of letters, from all the doctors apologizing for not detecting the problem
sooner.” As he said this, he pointed up to his apartment, as though the piles of letters were still
up there. “We had him cremated and put the ashes in a jar. We took the ashes with us when we
evacuated. We didn’t take much, but we took that. Whichever one of us dies first, me or my
wife, is going to be buried with Jingles’s ashes.”
Carl maintained a vigilant eye as he ambled back and forth between his car and the
baking sheets, always looking up and down the block, always checking. I followed his lead and
also kept an eye peeled. At one point a pickup truck with three men seated in the cab came
tearing down Erato from Galvez. The front tires of truck left the ground as it bounded up from a
dip in the road. This is it, I thought. Here come the thugs. We both stood and watched as the
truck barreled towards us, but then it just blew past and kept going.
“They moving like somebody’s chasing them,” Carl remarked after the truck had passed,
“Where are you staying now?” I asked.
“On the boat,” he said. Two Carnival Cruise ships had been chartered by FEMA to house
policemen, firemen, rescue workers, and first responders as well as their families. Carl must
have fit into the “family” category. The boats were docked at the Riverwalk near the French
Quarter.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“It’s nice,” said Carl, a touch begrudgingly, after a moment’s hesitation. “But it’s not
home. I’ll put it like that. It’s nice, but it’s not home.”
Carl said they could stay on the boat until March, and that he and his wife had lined up an
apartment that they could move into after that. But he said a lot of people on the boat feared they
would have nowhere to go come March. There had been a lot of talk in the newspapers about
closing the projects. People didn’t know what was going to happen to them. They cried because
they had no idea how they would get by in the future.
“My wife said to me the other day, ‘You know we’ve spent all these years talking about
getting out of the projects, and now all I want to do is get back in.’” Carl dumped another can of
wet food onto a mound of kibble.
I followed Carl around the side of the building to the back where he tossed two handfuls
of empty cat food cans into a dumpster. He pointed up to an apartment that had been burglarized
since the evacuation.
“People come home to get their belongings out of their houses, and they find that
someone has broken in and taken their stuff, so they break into someone else’s house and take
what they want. It’s like when I was in the army and someone stole my gear. I reported it to my
sergeant, and his advice was to find someone close to my size and take his stuff. ‘That’s
government property,’ he said. ‘You’re responsible for it. When inspection comes around, you
better have what you’re supposed to have.’”
Later Carl speculated that the Mexican laborers who had lately migrated into the city to
work, gutting and rebuilding homes, were responsible for robbing people’s apartments.
“You’d have to be pretty desperate to rob from the projects. You see that woman there?”
Carl pointed to an empty balcony across the street. The screen door flapped open in the wind.
“Someone came in and took everything she had. And she had next to nothing.”
I tried to get a sense of what the neighborhood might have looked like when people were
actually living there, sitting on porches, crossing the streets, talking, fighting, loving. I tried to
imagine the sounds, the activity, the culture and the crime: the projects. But all that remained
were ghosts, flapping doors, and Carl.
Carl talked about race. He said when he was a child, his mother had an old picture on
the wall of a man astride a horse. The man was wearing a full Indian head dress, and Carl had
always assumed the outfit had been some kind of Mardi Gras costume. One day he asked his
mother who the man was, and she told him it was papa.
“What do you mean, that’s papa?” young Carl asked.
“That’s papa,” said his mother. “That’s your grandfather.” That was when Carl learned
his family had Native American blood.
Carl gestured toward a porch behind us and said that once a young man he knew had
been sitting right there, talking about how white people should be killed.
“You know, your father was white,” Carl had said to the young man. When the young
man claimed to have no idea what Carl was talking about, Carl went to the young man’s mother.
“I asked his mother how come she never told the boy his father was white.”
“I thought he knew,” had been the mother’s response. “I would have told him, but I just
assumed that he knew.”
Evidently, the boy’s father had been Alphonse Picou, a white Creole jazz musician whose
picture, said Carl, “hangs in the jazz hall of fame right next to Louis Armstrong’s.” I began to
wonder whether Carl had a tendency to embellish his stories. Not that I minded, but I did
Carl said he had a daughter, living in California, who had married a white man and
another daughter who lived just up the street, also married to a white man. He said his family
had a white side and a black side, and when someone on the black side of the family died, the
white side cooked food, and everyone got together. When someone on the white side died, the
black side cooked and everyone got together.
“I read in the newspaper just the other day that when George Washington died, he left
twenty-five percent of his property to the son of his wife’s servant, a slave,” said Carl.
“Must have been his son,” I said.
“Exactly,” said Carl. “All those guys did that. Jefferson didn’t even make a secret about
it. He traveled around the country with his slave mistress. It’s like I told my wife, and she
doesn’t like to hear it, but if they had never abolished slavery, everyone would be your
complexion,” he said, pointing at me. “I’ve got white blood, black blood, and Indian blood in
me, so I have nothing to say about race.”
Carl sounded as though he had quite a bit to say about race. And it was what I wanted to
hear. It was why I was there.
As Carl named the cats and reminisced about his beloved movie-star dog Jingles, as he
pointed up to the balconies of his former neighbors and gestured toward the now lonely stoops,
as he looked up at his own now inaccessible apartment, which may or may not have contained a
stack of letters from apologetic veterinarians, I could see Carl filling in his own void, envisioning
the people who once lived there. The voids I sought to fill were empty spaces on a mental map,
geographic gaps in my understanding of how New Orleans fit together. By biking through
Central City, I colored in some of those spaces with a landscape desolated by flood and
evacuation, emptied of a population to which I still felt no connection, a different kind of void.
And though I lacked the necessary frame of reference to begin filling this flood-ravaged void, if
only in my imagination, Carl did not. I don’t think of Carl as some kind of medium through
the Cooper projects through Carl’s eyes, but Carl could. And I could see that. And to me that
felt important, worth witnessing.
I had wanted to explain myself to the people I encountered in Central City, to state my
purpose. Because I felt out of place as I biked past their wrecked homes, I assumed that I looked
out of place. I wanted those who lived there, those few who had returned, to know that I had
never been through their neighborhood before, not because I didn’t care, not because I wanted to
pretend it didn’t exist, but because I had been afraid. And I wanted to tell them that I was
uncomfortable with that. I suppose, in return, I hoped they would tell me that that was okay, that
my presence meant something, that they recognized and reciprocated my desire to connect.
I sensed that somehow Carl already knew all of that, not necessarily consciously, or
specifically, but intuitively. I don’t believe that feeling the need to explain myself as a white,
middle-class man, living in a predominantly black and largely poor city, put me in all that unique
a position. I imagine this feeling is relatively common and was probably nothing new to Carl.
So when Carl talked about his daughters who had married white men and how the white side and
the black side of his family came together for funerals, when he talked about his own mixed-race
background and that of the young man who had advocated killing white people, and when he
talked about the history of racial mixing in the United States, I understood his conversation as an
indirect acknowledgment of the fact that he was a black man and I was a white man. And
perhaps I’m projecting onto Carl what I wanted to hear, but it also seemed to me that Carl was
trying, by talking around the issue itself, to let me know that he recognized this racial division as
a social construct, as a reality of the world we share, but not as a fundamental distinction
between people. In Carl I perceived both a reciprocation of my desire to connect and a
validation of my need to do so. After talking with him, though I mostly listened, for what must
have been close to an hour, the need to explain myself felt superfluous.
In the wake of hurricane Katrina and the subsequent evacuations, many thought we had
an unprecedented opportunity to rebuild New Orleans from a clean slate. Months had passed
the storm had cleared the city of its “undesirables.” One couldn’t avoid, however, detecting ugly
racial undercurrents in such statements. I hoped for a different kind of cleansing, for a more
spiritual cleansing. The city might now unite behind a common tragedy. Old boundaries seemed
to have crumbled, metaphorically physicalized by the ubiquitous rubble, and as residents slowly
returned, we might work together to prevent those boundaries from reemerging. That was what I
imagined I was doing by biking through Central City, by visiting the parts of New Orleans from
which I had previously felt separated due to racial and class divisions. I thought that the
psychological boundaries that reinforced these divisions had allowed crime to thrive in the inner
city, had allowed white residents to dismiss the violence as someone else’s problem, a “black
problem.” A problem created by “them.” But the problems didn’t exist in a void. Everything
was connected. We all create the world in which we live. And, naive though it may have been,
clinging to the hope that some good might come from this tragedy, I told myself that by biking
through Central City, I could in some small way help make New Orleans whole. I thought that
by crossing the psychological boundaries reinforced by the voids in my mental map, by making
geographic connections between familiar and unfamiliar neighborhoods, I might begin to learn
how to penetrate the boundaries that separated me from the people who lived in those
neighborhoods.
After he had finished feeding the cats, Carl tossed the crumbs of kibble that remained in
the bottom of the bag to a cluster of pigeons that had gathered in the street. He got into his car
and took off his hat. His bald head glistened.
“When I first went to work for Carlos Marcello, we’d only spoken on the phone.” Carl
smiled up at me. Carlos Marcello had been well known gangster; he headed the New Orleans
made to a possible affiliation with the mob. I can’t remember what Carl said his last name was,
but it sounded Italian and began with the letter B. He’d given Marcello his name over the phone,
but when Carl actually walked into the room to meet Marcello in person, the gangster hadn’t
expected to see a black man. “At first he looked surprised,” Carl said. “And then he laughed.
He called me the Black Italian.”
It didn’t matter to me whether Carl had really worked for the mob. It seemed plausible
enough but beside the point. To me his parting anecdote underscored the point he’d talked
around for most of our conversation. Marcello was an outlaw and, as such, likely viewed many
of society’s conventions with an outsider’s perspective, as is probably the case for people of
most marginalized communities. I’m sure Carl, a man with black, white, and Indian blood, had
his own outsider’s take on the world. Because of Carl’s surname and the fact that he was, as yet,
just a voice on the phone, Marcello had assumed him to be Italian, which in part he may have
been. But when Marcello saw Carl, he saw a black man. Marcello’s wisdom, as I understood
the story, was in his laughter. Startled, at first, to see a black man when he expected an Italian,
Marcello immediately grasped the final meaninglessness of the distinction. Whether this is
actually true, whether Carlos Marcello, the man, really transcended racial prejudice, also seems
beside the point. Marcello, the character in Carl’s story, had the wisdom to disregard
conventional distinctions about race. Black or Italian, it makes no difference except to the extent
that we are willing to recognize one. Marcello and Carl, fellow outsiders, refused. Their mutual
The Purpose of The Poet
We’d seen this guy before, my wife Trish and I. The Poet, we called him. We’d met him
once in a bar. Trish and I were having a drink, waiting for a table to become available at the
small Italian restaurant upstairs, and The Poet had struck up a conversation with us. I can no
longer recall the details of our brief exchange, nor can I remember The Poet’s actual name,
though I’m sure he gave it to us. Our conversation probably lasted about five minutes before a
waiter informed us that our table was ready, but in that time, apropos of nothing, the man had
identified himself as a poet. Due to this unsolicited revelation, I assumed he must not be a very
good poet.
A good poet, I reasoned, a real poet, would have been more circumspect about revealing
his status as such, would have at least demonstrated a greater degree of humility than was
apparent in The Poet’s proud pronouncement of vocation. Now, I’m not suggesting that there’s
anything shameful in being a poet, quite the opposite in fact. I’m sure that many poets would
chafe at the thought of being considered “respectable,” and the world is full of dogged
utilitarians, or philistines if you prefer, who consider the pursuit of poetry a complete waste of
time. Nevertheless, I respect and admire both poetry and poets. But for a man in a bar to inform
a stranger, who hadn’t asked, that he is a poet struck me as lacking in tact, lacking in the kind of
self-awareness that would lead a true poet to consider such a claim unnecessary, even
inappropriate. He might as well have told me that he was a prophet. Some might be able to
accept such information without question, but it made me instantly suspicious of The Poet’s
motives and character. I asked myself, why would such a man, for no apparent reason, tell me
that he is a poet? Perhaps because he wishes to be perceived as a poet. One way to accomplish
this would be to write poetry and allow others to read it. If they liked it, then they would say
so-and-so is a poet. If they didn’t like it, they would say so-so-and-so writes poetry, which is not quite
Having not read The Poet’s work, I could only guess; but I suspected that he was just a
man who wrote poetry. And I suspected that The Poet, in his heart, probably knew this. And
there’s nothing wrong with that. Writing poetry can be a wonderful thing. But if such a man
fancies himself as something more than he is and wants to be recognized as such, without any
other evidence to support his claim, he may have to resort to telling people what he is. Some of
them may believe it.
Since that night at the bar, Trish and I had begun to notice The Poet here and there
around town, usually out drinking and listening to music. Each time we saw him, whoever
spotted him first would say to the other, “There’s that poet.” I even greeted him once, but he
didn’t seem to remember our brief conversation. No sign of recognition crossed his
countenance, and I didn’t try to remind him. I let the moment pass.
So in November of 2005 when Trish and I walked up to Tipitina’s, a popular nightclub in
Uptown New Orleans, to check out what Gambit Weekly had billed as “Indian Practice with
Monk Boudreaux,” I was amused to see a familiar face milling around the front door.
“There’s that poet,” I said to Trish.
It was a Sunday evening and the city was still struggling with the very first stages of
post-Katrina recovery. Most neighborhoods were still dark at night and empty, but tiny islands of
light and activity--the Sliver by the River, the Esplanade Ridge--shone faintly in the Gulf of
Darkness and Devastation. In those small areas of the city, restaurants and bars were reopening,
grocery stores were reopening. Every couple of days, news of a reopening attracted out
attention. We clung to this miniscule sense of optimism as though it were the spark, slowly
catching, that might keep the city alive. We became dedicated patrons, leisure zealots. We took
it as our civic duty to eat at the restaurants, to drink in the bars. Each opening was an event, a
little celebration of hope, sustaining the spirit of New Orleans.
Tipitina’s announced the Indian Practice as the first in a weekly series of practices on
Sunday nights, though I didn’t quite know what that meant. I’d never been to an Indian Practice.
spectator. Was it even for us, or was it for Indians who wanted to practice? We did get the
impression, though, that the event was open to the public, so we decided to check it out, support
Monk Boudreaux, Big Chief of the Golden Eagles Mardi Gras Indians, help keep the Indian
tradition alive--even if our role in that process still seemed unclear.
Curious about the event, I later looked into it. Traditionally, the Big Chiefs of different
tribes would hold Indian Practices on Sunday evenings. During the years of slavery in New
Orleans, slave owners recognized Sundays as days off for their slaves. On Sunday evenings in
Congo Square, behind the French Quarter, slaves gathered to make music, to sing, to dance.
Different rhythms from different African nations mixed and evolved. The Mardi Gras Indians
continued this tradition by holding Practices on Sunday evenings. Tribal members, family,
friends would come together, usually at someone’s house or at a neighborhood bar. They
brought tambourines and drums. They gathered around the Big Chief who set the rhythm and
selected the chant, established the response to his improvised calls, singing the legends of the
tribe passed down and embellished through generations. Other tribes might stop by to pay
respect to the Big Chief and join the Practice. But the flood had destroyed many of their homes
and haunts, including the house of Big Chief Monk Boudreaux. Indians had been scattered
across the country, many as yet unable to return; and the few who were still in New Orleans
needed a base from which to keep the culture alive. Tipitina’s and Monk Boudreaux had
conspired to create that base.
When we arrived, the Practice had not yet begun, so Trish and I took a seat on a metal
bench by the side of the club on Napoleon Avenue rather than wait in the crowd milling around
the front door. A pudgy man, who looked to be in his forties, emerged from the club’s side
entrance, the “stage entrance.” All business, he cut through the peanut gallery of eager
spectators, and gestured to a Japanese duo with a professional-looking digital video camera and
tripod and a young woman holding a notebook who had been standing on the street with the
“Come this way,” he said, with man-in-charge authority. He escorted them away from
the riffraff around the front door to the V.I.P. stage entrance and ushered them inside. “You can
come in and talk to Monk now.” They disappeared inside and the door closed behind them.
After about fifteen minutes, Tipitina’s opened its doors. At the club’s entrance, the
management had stationed a uniformed security guard whose job was to pass a metal detecting
wand over the arms, legs, between the legs, up the sides, of anyone who wanted to enter. This
was new. I had never seen a guard with a metal detector at the door to Tipitina’s before, and
neither had The Poet. This was not the way things were done before the storm.
“I’m not going to be searched to go into Tipitina’s,” The Poet said as he reached the
club’s door, loudly enough to be heard by everyone else waiting to get in. His protest held up
the line. His defiance began to create a scene. Someone inside the club insisted that the Poet
step aside. Others in line moved forward, raising their arms to submit to the search. “No,” cried
The Poet. “I’ve been coming here for twenty-five years. I’m not going to be searched.” The
Poet turned to face the crowd. “This is the beginning of the bad stuff,” he announced, moving
away from the door.
“The beginning of the bad stuff?” Trish said to me. “Like the past three months have
been great?” We continued to watch from our bench.
The Poet still was crying foul, attempting to engage the people standing in line. Most
tried to ignore him, averting their eyes, casting sideways glances, remaining silent, intently
indifferent. The pudgy manager, the same one who had admitted the reporter and film crew,
stepped out of the club, pulling The Poet away from the line.
“It’s about language,” I heard The Poet say.
The two men stood perhaps twenty feet from where Trish and I sat watching the drama
unfold. I could only overhear parts of their conversation.
“What else could I do?” asked the manager. “If something were to happen, if someone
Tipitina’s had not yet reopened as a business, as a Live-Music Venue. Indian Practice
had been arranged by the Tipitina’s Foundation, a nonprofit organization working to assist local
musicians after Katrina. The Tipitina’s Foundation had promoted the Indian Practice as a
cultural event. To help preserve the Mardi Gras Indian culture, Tipitina’s would host Practices
and open them to the public free of charge. At these events, though, Tipitina’s the business, the
bar, would sell drinks. From what I could gather from the bits of conversation I overheard, it
seemed that the manager felt pressure to be more cautious in order to ensure the foundation’s
nonprofit status, in particular its insurance policy. If some violence were to erupt in the club, the
foundation could lose its status and its insurance and would be forced to shut down.
“What would you do?” the manager asked The Poet. “Try to see it from my side of the
situation.”
The Poet was having a difficult time articulating his outrage. “I understand you
position,” he said, “but you need to understand where I’m coming from.” But when the
manager asked The Poet to explain, The Poet either couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. “It’s a long
conversation,” he said. “You and I would have to sit down and have a meal together. It’s about
language,” The Poet insisted.
The two men continued to butt heads, neither conceding the other’s position. The
manager insisted that his hands were tied, that he had no choice, and The Poet kept repeating that
it was “about language.” Trish and I sat on our bench watching and listening. Soon the manager
disengaged and turned to head back into the club.
“I’m going to write about this,” The Poet threatened.
“Great,” said the manager. “Write about it.” He’d had enough.
“I’m going to put it in a poem.”
“Do that.”
Just as the manager disappeared inside, a man in a light-colored suit, puffing on a cigar,
way to the club’s door. The Poet, now amped after his confrontation with the manager, accosted
them with his grievance.
“That’s the kind of guy who gives poets a bad name,” I said to Trish, responding to The
Poet’s embarrassingly inarticulate protest. He seemed like a burnt-out hippy: “It’s all about
language, man. It’s about laa-aanguage.” As the late, great J.B. said, “like a dull knife, that just
ain’t cuttin’,” The Poet was “talkin’ loud and sayin’ nothin’.”
Yet, The Poet’s reaction, however unpersuasive his appeal, made sense. Tipitina’s was a
departure for the Indians. Holding a Practice there made this traditionally black, cultural
tradition available to a white, middle-class audience in a way that it had not previously been.
Much of this new audience that turned out to catch its first glimpse of an Indian Practice would
not have ventured into the neighborhood bars where Practices would normally have been held.
Trish and I were among this group. By moving to Tipitina’s, the Mardi Gras Indians had
sacrificed a degree of cultural exclusivity that had been preserved, at least in part, by crime and
fear of crime in those neighborhoods where the Indians lived. Though few would argue in
defense of crime as a way to preserve culture, as a result of it, outsiders rarely attended Indian
Practices. The Practices existed as semiprivate events, belonging to the Mardi Gras Indian
community. Tipitina’s, as a venue, made the event “safe” for outsiders.
I don’t presume to know how the members of the Indian community felt about this
sudden change. I would guess that different people felt differently. They hadn’t chosen to be
flooded out of their homes and neighborhoods. Relocating to Tipitina’s and opening their
tradition to new communities were decisions born of necessity, for survival. But they also hadn’t
chosen to be segregated into crime-ridden neighborhoods in the first place. I imagine some of
the Indians welcomed the opportunity to hold their practices at Tipitina’s and were proud to
share their culture with new people. But they probably also felt a little protective of what had
once been more exclusively theirs. At least I think I would have felt that way.
It was about language. In a sense the Mardi Gras Indians were guests, friends in need.
other communities. But what kind of message does it send when you feel the need to search
your guests for weapons to preserve a sense of security for a new, mostly white, middle-class
audience? One might--and I suspect The Poet did--interpret that message as: “We’re happy to
have you, but we don’t trust you.”
But the manager had a point as well. Crime was not a fairy tale, and gatherings of the
Mardi Gras Indians had, as recently as that past spring, to everyone’s disappointment, resulted in
violence and friction with the police. Before World War II the Indian culture, which emerged
sometime during the late nineteenth century, had been far more violent than it gradually became
in the years following the war. In the early years, Indians used the Mardi Gras celebration to
settle scores with rivals, and death on “the battlefield” was common. Allison “Tootie” Montana,
Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas Mardi Gras Indians for almost fifty years, is commonly
credited with changing Indian culture from one of violence to one of artistic expression. Still,
because crime continued to cause problems in the neighborhoods in which Indians lived, they
couldn’t escape it entirely, even though it was no longer a result of Indian culture itself.
Montana died of a heart attack in June of 2005 moments after presenting a speech at a
City Council meeting in defense of Indian culture. The meeting had been convened to review
allegations of police misconduct toward Indians during their celebration in the spring. Indians
wanted to shed their violent reputation. I’m sure Monk Boudreaux was just as interested in
keeping out the “bad element” as the manager was. It was a bitter reality, but a reality all the
same. I watched men with tambourines, Indians from different tribes, approach the front door
and lift their arms for the metal detector. They didn’t seem to mind. They didn’t protest as The
Poet had. And if they did mind, they kept their cool.
Soon the man in the light-colored suit and the woman in the cocktail dress became weary
of The Poet’s righteous diatribe and walked away.
“It’s about language,” The Poet called after them.
Though I had chafed at the way The Poet had lost his cool, I didn’t like the way the man
in the suit with the cigar had sauntered. His demeanor reeked of entitlement. If that guy thinks
it’s about rolling with it, I thought, then it’s got to be about something else.
“This is the end of something,” The Poet proclaimed, sad and disgusted, before finally
walking away.
Now that the altercation had passed, Trish and I decided to enter the club. I wasn’t sure
what The Poet’s protest had accomplished other than making him look like a soft-headed
reactionary. He said he was going to write about it, put it in a poem. I hoped he would be more
articulate in his writing. But now he was gone. He would miss the Indian Practice. Had he kept
his cool, had he responded more gracefully, he could have both written his poem and supported
the Indians. That was, after all, why we were there, right? To support the culture? I suppose he
felt as though he was supporting them by refusing to be searched. But the Indians were
searched. And they kept their cool. Maybe they didn’t like it either. Maybe they had become
accustomed to this kind of treatment, grown indifferent to regular searches by security guards or
the police. They had, after all, grown up in a city where black men were routinely profiled as
potential criminals. Just being on the street after dark made them suspect in the eyes of the law.
Resisting a police officer’s search was futile and usually resulted in routine arrest. After a while,
I imagine, one might become conditioned to put up with a degree of harassment even if one
didn’t like it. They must have recognized the injustice of the search, but perhaps they had
learned to keep their cool.
The Poet made himself look ridiculous in front of Tipitina’s. I felt embarrassed for him
and sensed the same, if not worse, if not some derision, from others, those who looked away,
who shook their heads or rolled their eyes, who stepped past The Poet and raised their arms for
the metal detector. The Poet had lost his cool and made a big stink. He failed to convince
others, failed to reason with the manager; no one seemed to take him seriously. But he made his
Poets have a reputation for being passionate. Sometimes passion overtakes reason;
emotion trumps intellect. In a civilized society reasonable behavior, rational behavior, cool
behavior is often highly valued. It helps us to get along with each other, helps us work out our
differences with the least amount of friction. We tend to frown upon the irrational, the
disagreeable, or the uncool. Such dispositions can make life unpleasant. But sometimes “cool”
can be a cowardly pose, can help perpetuate an unjust status quo. I kept my cool, succumbed to
the search, and observed the Indian Practice. The Poet lost his, looked a fool, and went home
angry. But had he not sacrificed his own cool, I don’t think I would have questioned the metal
detector to the extent that I did. I might have thought the added security odd, unusual,
unnecessary. I might even have thought it racist, but those thoughts probably would have come
and gone. The Poet may have lost his cool, but perhaps someone had to. And if not The Poet,
then who? On that Sunday in November, no one else stepped up.
On subsequent Sundays, when Trish and I returned to revisit the Indian Practice, we were
pleased to note that the management at Tipitina’s had discontinued the security check at the door.
The change may or may not have had anything to do with The Poet’s dissent; but, though I may
“Indian Red”
I didn’t want to go to the protest.
A week before at the second-line parade, organized by the Black Men of Labours Social
and Pleasure Club, a young activist had handed us a card announcing the time and location of a
protest to be held the following week, on December 10th, 2005. According to the card, a
grassroots group called the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition, in order to
raise awareness and support for their cause, had planned a series of town-meeting-style events to
take place at various locations along the Gulf Coast. The group planned to conclude its tour by
hosting a protest march at Congo Square in New Orleans. The purpose of the protest was to
demand the “right of return” for all displaced residents, with particular emphasis on residents
from a part of New Orleans called the Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly poor, black
neighborhood. Many of the homes there had been obliterated by a breach in the Industrial Canal
levee following hurricane Katrina, a breach that reopened and re-flooded the community during
hurricane Rita three weeks later.
Representatives of the federal, state, and city governments, as well as a smattering of
New Orleans locals, well-heeled and otherwise, had been making noises about “bulldozing”
certain parts of the city--generally low-lying, poor neighborhoods--to create “flood zones” and
“green spaces.” Many people who lived in the neighborhoods ripe for bulldozing had been
unable--and in the case of the Lower Nine, due to the extent of the devastation, not allowed--to
return home to defend their rights as landowners. Their very absence made them particularly
vulnerable to the possibility of a governmentally sanctioned rip-off. The term “eminent domain”
had been tossed around in public discourse with reference to the Lower Ninth Ward as well as to
New Orleans East, a far vaster, also predominantly black, part of the city that flooded, and to
which residents also had been largely unable to return. Someone had to stand up for the rights of
the poor in exile, and I supported the cause. But a protest? On Saturday? I wasn’t so sure.
My wife Trish and I had lived in Austin, Texas during the months leading up to the U.S.
Texas State Capitol building. These events were always held on Saturdays. I assumed that the
organizers had chosen Saturday to maximize attendance, figuring more people were likely to
have the day off. Unfortunately, the government officials who worked in the capitol building, to
whom I thought we should be directing our protest, also had Saturdays off. Thousands of
like-minded, antiwar demonstrators gathered to distribute petitions and literature. Guest speakers
stood behind a podium and testified to an already sympathetic audience (occasionally even
hectoring their sympathetic audience for not being more actively sympathetic), leading chants of
dissent that echoed against the pink stone walls of the capitol building, empty (I imagined) save
for a largely Mexican cleaning staff busy polishing the brass railings and dusting the stiff
portraits of former governors.
“What’s the point?” I complained with an increasing sense of futility about these
seemingly self-congratulatory events. An invasion of Iraq seemed inevitable. I felt marginalized
and ineffectual as a participant in a series of protests that amounted to the largest, public antiwar
demonstration in U.S. history. The result? President Bush affirmed our right as Americans to
express our opinions, while simultaneously dismissing what we had to say. He would do what
he wanted to do, and that was that. And so he did.
But our demonstrations in Austin were lame, impotent events. The organizers had applied
for and been granted permits by the government, whose actions we claimed to protest, to hold
demonstrations on days convenient for said government, and were encouraged to ensure a
minimum of civic disruption lest the government decide to reject future applications for
permission to protest.
In my first year of college, some fifteen years prior in Chicago, several student groups
had organized a protest against a marginal increase in student fees proposed for the following
year, a petty cause to be sure. At a designated time, we were all to leave our classes en masse
and converge on the administration building for chanting and general civil disobedience. As the
“You’re asking for permission to walk out of my class in protest?” he asked
incredulously. Evidently, we had misunderstood the purpose of a protest. Our professor was
“the man.” It was to him that we were supposed to “stick it.”
“At least shout, ‘Fuck you, Murphy,” or something on your way out,” he requested after
granting us permission to leave. “Just to make it seem real.”
As we scampered down the hall, giddy with revolutionary zeal, I shouted “Fuck you,
Murphy,” just as the man had asked me to do. My fellow classmates laughed at my faux outrage.
And so it goes.
In Austin, as Bush positioned troops in Iraq for the commencement of his “shock and
awe” invasion, we should have shouted in genuine outrage, in the middle of the week, in the
middle of the workday, as the Texas state bureaucrats pushed the papers that helped keep the
whole horrible machine chugging steadily toward war. We should have walked away from our
jobs, forced the whir of commerce to a grinding halt, disrupted the steady flow of traffic, and
instigated a maximum of (un)civil disobedience. We should have demanded to be heard or
arrested. But that didn’t happen. We were too polite. Didn’t want to alienate “the mainstream.”
Hell, a lot of people favored going to war. And no one wanted to risk losing his or her job over
it. The economy seemed to worsen by the day. People had bills and mortgages and children to
take care of. Some people even liked their jobs, just as we had liked Ric Murphy’s class. And
really, we just weren’t angry enough to disregard the relative degrees of comfort to which we
had grown accustomed, not outraged enough to put ourselves out. It wasn’t like the invasion
would really affect us, right? Not directly. Who’s going to risk jail time for some distant moral
ideal? And, gosh, the moral arguments for and against war seemed to get so complicated so
quickly. And anyway, the President had made it perfectly clear that our opinion meant nothing
to him. So to ease our frightened consciences, we would gather on Saturdays for a few hours,
when it was safe and sanctioned, and blow off some steam at an empty building.
When Trish asked whether I wanted to attend the protest on Saturday at Congo Square to
